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MattSteelbladelast Friday at 2:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

Not even a little; doesn’t pass napkin math. It doesn’t solve any problems while adding a litany of new ones: massive radiators for heat rejection, radiation hardening, and enormous launch + repair costs (assuming repairs are even possible). The idea exists to separate investors from their money; the product is the funding round.


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codethieflast Friday at 2:58 PM

I haven't done the actual math and I might be a few orders of magnitude off but shouldn't electrical resistance drop quite significantly in space, too? (Of course there's the other issue that information processing is an inherently dissipative process because entropy etc.)

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fouclast Friday at 3:07 PM

there's no repair involved. imagine a series of throwaway satellites on an orbit that essentially leaves them close enough together for effective mesh networking, and probably on an orbit that slowly takes them away from earth.

the compute is used for training, not inference. the redundancy and mesh networking means that if any of them die, it is no big deal.

and an orbit that takes them away from earth means they avoid cluttering up earth's orbital field.

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